such great heights
by piston heart
Summary: Is it wrong to love two people for the same reason? —LelouchShirley, SuzakuShirley


**A/N: **So. I found this in my documents a few days ago, and I think it was a request I started back in July that just got took big for its own good. I'm sorry to whoever requested it! Still, I finished it, and I'm actually sort of satisfied with it. For once.

**Warnings: **Spoilers for the entire series.

**Disclaimer: **Silly readers, Code Geass is for Sunrise!

- - - -  
SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS  
_Everything looks perfect from far away._

This is what Lelouch says:

'"Promise me," he mutters, hands sliding through her wet hair and snagging on tangles, "promise me you won't believe a word."

But she does. She was always too trusting, too naive—it was a charm as well as a curse. Shirley believes every lie he tells her. Is it so wrong? She wants him to—not love her, no, because she'd be fine with loving him from afar. It might hurt if he tells her there's someone else. It would hurt. She expects it and somehow that makes it worse, like the very air is weighing down on her skin, like she's waiting for something that will tear her apart. Like she tastes it on his lips and sees it in his eyes. That doesn't mean she'll stop loving him. She'll never stop. It's as much as a curse as her naiveté—she just can't stop eating the pomegranate seeds, she just can't stop biting into that apple, she just wants to know the difference between right and wrong. Is that so wrong?

_Yes._

Yes.

* * *

She bumps into him in the hallway, one day. Her head was up in the clouds, her arms full of books, and her legs were throbbing from a particularly harsh swimming session. It wasn't intentional. All she did was accidentally step around someone and run into him.

Her books were all over the floor. None of that mattered. She didn't notice it; she was too busy gaping up at an angel with black hair and purple eyes and a broken, polite smile she wanted to kiss away. Her hands shook. She nodded numbly as he apologized and helped her gather up her things, dumping them into her arms and lingering. Their knees were touching. She wanted to cry, and her heart was thumping so fast it hurt, and her mouth tasted like ashes and rain, and she didn't know _why._

"Um," she said. "Do you—I mean, do I—Have we met before?"

"No," he said, and she hears _don't believe a word.

* * *

_

She runs and runs and can never escape from herself.

Shirley thinks she's going crazy. It's hard to believe that this is all a _lie_—that she had been in love with Lelouch before, that she had forgotten him, that he was Zero. That he'd been the one to kill her dad. The last one isn't a lie, but the fact  
that he erased it makes it as bad as. She feels like she's drowning.

The paper is soft. The writing is hardly legible. It crumples when she clenches her hand into a fist.

It's like the world has stopped turning. It hasn't—nothing can stop the world. Outside, the sky is still blue and people are still dying and oh, oh god, it's all Lelouch's fault.

She still loves him, even knowing that he's killed so many people. Maybe if she wasn't so sure, if her love wasn't rooted so deeply it entwined around the core of her being, she would wonder if this made her a bad person.

Well. She wouldn't care if it did.

* * *

The thing is, remembering doesn't fix everything. She knows she loves him. Shirley knows—with more certainty than she's ever known anything before—that she's _in_ love with him, despite the blood on his hands and the crack in his soul. Maybe she can't save him. She doesn't know anything about saving people, about redemption, about rebirth, but she can try.

None of that is the point.

The point is she's fallen in love with someone else.

* * *

It happened in the silence.

She walked into a quiet room. There wasn't anyone that she could see. She sat down and when she looked up, there was a boy with messy brown hair that hung in front of his green eyes, and his shoulders shook with silent sobs.

It surprised her, of course.

"Oh," she had breathed. He didn't seem to notice. "Oh—I'm sorry—hey. Hey. It's okay. Everything is going to be all right, all right?"

She had reached across the table and taken his hand in her own. He had jerked away. His eyes were wild, the color of gooseberries and impossibly green fields, of plant stems.

"No, no it's not. It never will be again."

"Nothing isn't fixable," she said, but she was seeing someone different. She was seeing hyacinth eyes and black hair. Then she shook her head and the memory—the fantasy—was gone.

"Just leave me alone."

"I can't."

They stared at each other, green meeting green, until the boy lowered his head and let out a choked laugh. Shirley darted her hand forward. It lingered in the air before it reached, slowly, towards the boy's head and began to stroke his hair. She wasn't aware that she'd been holding her breath before she sighed, releasing it.

"W—why do you care?" The boy wiped his face on his sleeve.

"I—" she hesitated. There were plenty of answers she could give, all of them honest. She couldn't stand to see a living thing in pain. When she was younger, she'd brought home baby birds that had fallen from their nests, and lizards that had lost their tails, and kittens that had been left mewling in the rain. The other reason was that the boy reminded her of someone. She couldn't put her finger on it, but it was at the tip of her tongue, and it was—it was more of a feeling than a recollection. It was something that tugged at her heartstrings. She wanted to make the boy smile, to fix the thing that bled behind his eyes, to lift the weight off his shoulders. She didn't know if she could, but she wanted to try. "I don't know. I'm a naturally caring person, I suppose."

"You wouldn't care about me if you knew who I was," he said, bitterness working through his jaw and down the line of his throat. His back hunched. He dangled his hands over his knees, the fingers curling, and she felt his hair shift against her palm. "Don't you know who I am?"

"N—no. Am I supposed to?"

"I'm Suzaku Kururugi, former knight of Princess Euphemia, and a Knight of the Rounds. Yeah, I think you should know about me." His smile was mocking, and it cut into her like a knife, but Shirley held her ground. She didn't flinch. It seemed to her that flinching would almost be like admitting defeat.

"Oh. So what you really mean is that you're an Eleven."

He nodded. The boy—Suzaku—looked like he wanted her to spit at him, or turn away. He was eager for it. He leaned forward from expectation, his breath dusting her knuckles, eyes over-bright in his face. They searched her for disgust.

_Well,_ Shirley said to his eyes, _you aren't going to find any._

"It doesn't really matter, does it?" she asked, sitting down next to him. He started. She dropped her hand and took one of his own with it, blushing at her own boldness, looking at the scabs that covered the junction of his fingers and his palm. "I mean, you're an Eleven. I'm a Britannian. You're supposed to hate me just like I'm supposed to hate you, but I don't. It's hard to hate someone who you find crying in the Student Council room."

"No. You're supposed to hate me because—because—" He took a deep breath, scrubbing at his face with the hem of his shirt, looking anywhere but her. "Because I loved her. Princess Euphemia. And she's crazy, and she massacred thousands of people, and even if Britannians hate Elevens they hate her more."

"If you loved her, there must have been something good in her," Shirley replied firmly. She gave his hand a light squeeze. Something stirred in her, that familiar tugged heartstrings feeling, like she could relate to every word he was saying. "My father was killed by Zero, but I..." She shook her head, bracing herself. She'd never said these words aloud before. "And I'm supposed to hate Zero. But I can't. I don't know why, or how, but I can't hate him. He's just a person underneath that mask."

"Some people would disagree." Suzaku's voice had taken a hard edge.

She shrugged and stood up. "Come on, it's getting late. You can't walk out of here looking like that. There's a private bathroom the next floor up—no one will be going into it this late after school, so you'll be safe."

He nodded, and she took it as a thank you.

* * *

That wasn't when she fell in love with him. Love came much later, and she didn't even call it that—love was a big, scary emotion that she didn't dare put a name to. It was shapeless and slow.

She wasn't sure of when or why or how, but he started sitting with her at lunch. She'd help him with his schoolwork. They  
shared most of their classes, and they'd sit outside with each other during breaks, pointing out clouds or planes or birds. It was simple and easy. The two of them were bound to each other by a dark room and confessions, but it didn't matter, not when they were out in the daylight. They laughed. They joked. They talked to each other, never seriously, not about anything that mattered, but it was enough. It was more than enough.

Sometimes, it seemed like everything.

He only kissed her once. They were walking together at the end of the day, and a leaf got caught in her hair. He picked it out. She caught his wrist, keeping his hand pressed to the side of her face, and they stared at each other. He leaned forward. It wasn't a kiss on the lips: it skirted from the tip of her nose to her cheekbone, and then it was over. She laughed, awkwardly, and soon they were both giggling, breathless and exuberant.

It was happy. It made her happy, to teach him how to smile again. She never understood what was going on in his head, but he smiled, and he laughed. So what if a shadow skittered across his face? It was gone moments later. She healed him, and in the process he healed her.

Like everything happy, it couldn't last.

* * *

_Why are you here? _he asks her, with everything in him. With his eyes and his hands and his lips. With his fingers, that trace the cartography of her face and the scoop of her lip and the fork of her eyelashes, that touch the fast-fast-faster pulse in her throat.

_I don't know,_ she replies, with everything she isn't. She isn't a princess. She can't save him, but maybe she can slow his fall, so she leans forward and presses her lips against him. Hard, harder than she'd ever dared kiss Lelouch, like she's trying to bleed herself into him. Trying to push happiness into him, to carve a smile onto his face, to make him believe in happy endings. In happy things. In her, in himself; in hope and faith and, maybe, falling isn't so bad.

* * *

She remembered, and she died for it. Shirley couldn't bring herself to regret it.

She knew what that feeling had been. It had been remembrance; the shadow of her memories. She had always wanted to fix things, after all. First her little animals, then Lelouch, and finally Suzaku. In the end, it all came back to Lelouch. Everything did.

Shirley was bleeding her life out on the floor. She felt herself say things, but she was already so far away, past caring of what happened next. It would all work out in the end. They deserved happy endings, didn't they? and happy endings always came to the people who deserved them. Maybe she wasn't getting one, but she wasn't the princess, or the damsel, or the warrior. She was the supporting character. She wasn't Guinevere, but perhaps she was Elaine, floating down the river, her cause of death a broken heart. A happy ending for Lelouch was enough for her.

Blood was warm on her lips. It dribbled past them, coating her chin, drawing lines down her throat and over her collarbone. Her thighs rested in a pool of it. She could see Lelouch's face above her, pale and drawn, Geass spinning red. The other eye was still that beautiful, bruised shade of purple.

_I wish I could have seen you smile._

There was someone else. She knew he wasn't there, but she could feel him: someone else she'd wanted to see smile. She'd succeeded with him. And she knew that he wouldn't get his happy ending, because Lelouch's wouldn't be enough for him, and

And

And

and, nothing.

* * *

_Feedback appreciated!_


End file.
